Welcome to the new year. You may have noticed Bitcoin’s extraordinary take-off last year, during which a majority of cryptocurrencies experienced huge gains. What does 2018 have in store for Bitcoin and all of the other cryptocurrencies? You’re soon to learn why things might not happen as you would expect. Let’s dive into the year of the AltCoins and see how a lot of coins other than Bitcoin will take the spotlight.
It’s important that enough miners keep trying to mine blocks because this is another valuable service miners provide the network. Bitcoin, like gold, is powerful as a store of value because it is decentralized and trustless. There is no one central authority who holds all the power over bitcoin, just like no central authority holds power over gold.
Gold, unlike fiat currencies, requires no trust and faith in a government to responsibly manage its money supply and other financial dealings in order to believe that it will retain its value well over time. This is because gold has no central authority that controls it and effectively dictates its supply and creation arbitrarily. Gold is fundamentally scarce, and only a small amount of it can be mined every year and added to the whole net supply. To date, the estimated total of all the gold ever mined in the history of humankind is only 165,000 metric tons. To put that in perspective, all that gold wouldn’t even fill up 3.5 Olympic sized swimming pools.

Market Capitalization and Daily Trading Volume – A cryptocurrency’s market capitalization is the total worth of all coins currently in circulation, and at the time of writing, the total cryptocurrency market capitalization is nearly $139 billion. High market capitalization can indicate a high value per coin. It is important to note that the daily trading volume of currencies is more important than market capitalization.

All of this said, while these principles can and should be kept in mind at large for just about any investment, cryptocurrencies are dramatically different from stocks, bonds, or any other sort of traditional investment vehicle. They’re also so early stage and so volatile that it’s a near-certainty that a value investor like Benjamin Graham wouldn’t even dream of labeling such opportunities as investments, rather than speculations (at best, they would be labeled growth investments, but I’m working with the Buffett philosophy that there is no difference between ‘value’ and ‘growth’ investing, and that good value investing appropriately takes into account growth).
Lastly, you’ll have to connect a payment method. For years, credit cards were the most common way to pay for Bitcoin. Recently, however, credit card issuers and some international governments have put strict regulations on using credit cards as a buying option. Most credit cards are no longer accepted as a method of payment, meaning people have had to look into other options.
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